{"id":1102,"date":"2013-02-13T03:34:24","date_gmt":"2013-02-13T08:34:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/?p=1102"},"modified":"2022-07-01T16:42:18","modified_gmt":"2022-07-01T20:42:18","slug":"im-big-in-china","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/2013\/02\/im-big-in-china\/","title":{"rendered":"I&#8217;m Big In China"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright size-full wp-image-799\" alt=\"goldleader-icon\" src=\"https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/09\/goldleader-icon.png\" width=\"100\" height=\"100\" \/>About four days short of a month after launch, earlier today my small Flash game\u00a0<em><a href=\"http:\/\/rocketshipgames.com\/games\/goldleader\/\">Gold Leader<\/a><\/em> crossed over 102,000+ visitors, some 151,000+ plays. \u00a0Google Analytics believes just under 58,000 of them are actually unique and 45,000 are returning players. \u00a0That&#8217;s super sweet from a &#8220;People played my game!&#8221; perspective. \u00a0The breakdown on who they are is also pretty interesting. \u00a0Basically, I&#8217;m big in China, except that\u00a0to actually be &#8220;big&#8221; in China you would need to be tremendously huge.<\/p>\n<h2>Growth<\/h2>\n<p>This is a plot of the game&#8217;s &#8216;load&#8217; event, kicked off right after the preloader finishes and the sponsor splash screen plays:<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_1103\" style=\"width: 310px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/02\/gold-leader-loads.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-1103\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-1103\" alt=\"Gold Leader game loads since (just before) launch.\" src=\"https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/02\/gold-leader-loads-300x60.png\" width=\"300\" height=\"60\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/02\/gold-leader-loads-300x60.png 300w, https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/02\/gold-leader-loads.png 745w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-1103\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Gold Leader game loads since (just before) launch.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>With any minimal knowledge of the Flash game scene, you can probably basically guess at the story from just glancing at the chart. \u00a0For others, it&#8217;s important to understand a key characteristic of most Flash games: There is a ridiculous number of game sites out there, and they generally all steal and share each other&#8217;s games in an attempt to capture eyeballs from other sites. \u00a0Hence, the sponsor requested that <em><a href=\"http:\/\/rocketshipgames.com\/games\/goldleader\/\">Gold Leader<\/a><\/em> not be locked down to their particular site. \u00a0The timeline:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The game was launched on <a href=\"http:\/\/gameshed.com\">GameShed.com <\/a>on January 16th. \u00a0Due to the scale of the later hits it&#8217;s not noticeable, but the game starts at about a 100 players a day and ramps up a bit.<\/li>\n<li>January 21st or so I put the <a href=\"http:\/\/gameshed.com\">GameShed<\/a> branded version on <a href=\"http:\/\/newgrounds.com\">Newgrounds<\/a> and <a href=\"kongregate.com\">Kongregate<\/a>.\u00a0 It sits in judgement for a bit over a day on each, essentially a staging area they use for adventurous users to rate new, unscreened content and determine if and how it&#8217;ll be posted to the main page.<\/li>\n<li>The game eventually makes it out, even with a reasonable rating on Newgrounds (currently about a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.newgrounds.com\/portal\/view\/609714\">3.25 after 1721 views<\/a>). \u00a0Due to the kind of silly way judgement seems to work though, it never really hits the front page&#8212;it&#8217;s blocked by games that were posted later and are actually rated lower but got more votes more quickly so they came out of judgement faster and sorted to the top by original posting date. \u00a0You have to go to the second page of new games to find <em><a href=\"http:\/\/rocketshipgames.com\/games\/goldleader\/\">Gold Leader<\/a><\/em>, but it&#8217;s out there.<\/li>\n<li>Around the same time, <a href=\"http:\/\/gameshed.com\">GameShed<\/a> also puts the game on <a href=\"http:\/\/flashgamedistribution.com\/\">FlashGameDistribution.com<\/a>,\u00a0a service that portals and arcades use to share Flash game files. \u00a0This throws more potential hosts into the mix, with some 95 portals having looked at the game through there as of this moment.<\/li>\n<li>Within a day or so, searches like &#8220;gold leader flash game&#8221; start turning up hundreds of sites hosting the game. \u00a0Almost all of this is certainly coming from hosts that pulled the game off either <a href=\"newgrounds.com\">Newgrounds<\/a> or <a href=\"kongregate.com\">Kongregate<\/a>. \u00a0I can&#8217;t really guess which, though I kind of thing the latter even though the game&#8217;s even less prominent there.<\/li>\n<li>Play explodes, at least in relative terms.<\/li>\n<li>As it drifts of the main pages of all these sites, it goes down pretty rapidly but after a couple weeks is still clocking in a steady 3800 unique visitors per day.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>After a while I would have been convinced the steady hits were bots crawling sites and somehow\/for some reason loading the SWF or something ridiculous like that, if not for the steady uptick in detailed play stats. \u00a0At this point, 7,000 people have played all the way through the entire game, about 13 minutes of play if you can manage to do it straight through, pretty hard to do.<\/p>\n<h2>Demographics<\/h2>\n<p>Not too surprisingly given what I gathered from reading what few discussions of Flash game play numbers I&#8217;ve come across, most of the traffic is from China:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>China 88,000<\/li>\n<li>Romania 2,200<\/li>\n<li>USA 2,000<\/li>\n<li>Russia 1,200<\/li>\n<li>Italy 800<\/li>\n<li>Vietnam 750<\/li>\n<li>Unknown 700<\/li>\n<li>Slovakia 500<\/li>\n<li>Germany 400<\/li>\n<li>Ukraine 430<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>And on from there. \u00a0The game has been played from at least 127 countries. \u00a0My geography\/social studies-major sister will no doubt be pleased that I had actually heard of all of them. \u00a0In any event, someone from Botswana, Brunei, and a bunch of other barely-heard-of-in-the-US nations have played <em><a href=\"http:\/\/rocketshipgames.com\/games\/goldleader\/\">Gold Leader<\/a>.<\/em>\u00a0 That&#8217;s great!<\/p>\n<p>The Romanian and Russian and other Eastern European hits aren&#8217;t too surprising. \u00a0I don&#8217;t actually know, but believe <a href=\"http:\/\/gameshed.com\">GameShed<\/a> operates out of Eastern Europe, quite possibly one of those two, so that could easily account for those numbers.<\/p>\n<p>Shame on the British though for not playing more! \u00a0Even the French played more!<\/p>\n<h2>Rocketship Games Breaches the Great Internet Wall<\/h2>\n<p>In any event, China. \u00a0A huge portion of the hits are coming from just three Chinese sites:\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.3366.com\/game\/88131.shtml\">3366.com<\/a>,\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.4399.com\/flash\/109170.htm\">4399.com<\/a>, and\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.7k7k.com\/\">7k7k.com<\/a>. \u00a0Interestingly, the original entry point into China, whichever site it was, probably either lifted the game from <a href=\"http:\/\/gameshed.com\">GameShed.com<\/a>\u00a0or went searching for assets and found them there.\u00a0 <a href=\"http:\/\/gameshed.com\">GameShed<\/a> created icons for their menus and achievement badges\u00a0with (to me) distinctive higher-resolution purple and grey bars behind the ships, which the Chinese sites seem to be using.<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_1104\" style=\"width: 310px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/02\/homepage-3366.com_.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-1104\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-1104 \" alt=\"\" src=\"https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/02\/homepage-3366.com_-300x273.png\" width=\"300\" height=\"273\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/02\/homepage-3366.com_-300x273.png 300w, https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/02\/homepage-3366.com_-1024x931.png 1024w, https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/02\/homepage-3366.com_.png 1135w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-1104\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Homepage for 3366.com showing Gold Leader in my personal games-played portfolio.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>Fantastically, these sites all have little translation guides telling Chinese language players what inscrutable English symbols to click on to start the game and other required tasks:<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_1105\" style=\"width: 310px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/02\/playguide-3366.com_.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-1105\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-1105\" alt=\"Play guide on 3366.com.\" src=\"https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/02\/playguide-3366.com_-300x273.png\" width=\"300\" height=\"273\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/02\/playguide-3366.com_-300x273.png 300w, https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/02\/playguide-3366.com_-1024x931.png 1024w, https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/02\/playguide-3366.com_.png 1135w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-1105\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Play guide on 3366.com.<\/p><\/div>\n<div id=\"attachment_1106\" style=\"width: 310px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/02\/playguide-en-3366.com_.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-1106\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-1106\" alt=\"Play guide on 3366.com, translated from the original Han.\" src=\"https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/02\/playguide-en-3366.com_-300x288.png\" width=\"300\" height=\"288\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/02\/playguide-en-3366.com_-300x288.png 300w, https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/02\/playguide-en-3366.com_-1024x983.png 1024w, https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/02\/playguide-en-3366.com_.png 1076w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-1106\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Play guide on 3366.com, translated from the original Han.<\/p><\/div>\n<h2>Hacked!<\/h2>\n<p>Less fantastically, the Chinese sites have all added their own little preloaders that essentially cut my preloader down to a click-through. \u00a0It doesn&#8217;t really affect me since I&#8217;m not particularly trying to monetize the game, but this tracks with what I&#8217;ve read about Chinese game portals cutting out ads from other games. \u00a0I can see why developers and sponsors would be annoyed. \u00a0That&#8217;s a huge percentage of your views to have stolen away.<\/p>\n<p>Way, way more awesomely though (in some sense), at least one site hacked the game. \u00a0From <a href=\"http:\/\/www.4399.com\/flash\/109170.htm\">4399.com<\/a>, I present to you:\u00a0<em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.4399.com\/flash\/109240_1.htm\">Gold Leader&#8212;Prime Fighter Invincible Version<\/a><\/em>! \u00a0The title pretty much says it all. \u00a0Incredibly, they altered the bytecode of the game such that you can&#8217;t take damage and you can&#8217;t fail the missions. \u00a0Personally I find it pretty boring to play, but it&#8217;s rated a solid half a star better than the standard version on their site&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Either way, that&#8217;s ridiculous. \u00a0Everything else seems to work fine. \u00a0You even get the warnings that you&#8217;re in danger of failing, it just doesn&#8217;t ever happen. \u00a0That&#8217;s some scalpel-like precision, especially when you figure the game&#8217;s <a href=\"http:\/\/code.google.com\/p\/rockethaxe\/\">written in Haxe<\/a> so the bytecode probably even looks and decompiles differently from a game produced in a more standard fashion using AS3 or Flash Builder.<\/p>\n<p>Previously I noted how this experience has made real for me the bandwidth and other resource requirements consumed even on the very very minor end of &#8220;Internet scale.&#8221; \u00a0This development has changed my thinking on cheating. \u00a0Previously I&#8217;d always figured hacking and cheating couldn&#8217;t possibly be a huge concern for any but the most serious games. \u00a0That&#8217;s completely wrong, you will be hacked and there will be cheaters. \u00a0I&#8217;m not even rated that highly on this site but they put in what to me seems a non-trivial effort to do so.<\/p>\n<p>Fortunately their players still don&#8217;t seem to be actually scoring particularly high or they&#8217;re not submitting to the Mochi leaderboard, so that&#8217;s still sane.<\/p>\n<h2>Games as Communication<\/h2>\n<p>Back on the more positive side, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.3366.com\/game\/88131.shtml\">3366.com<\/a> actually has a steady stream of commenters. \u00a0I have little idea what they&#8217;re actually saying in detail, the Google Translate version is amazing nonsense about &#8220;Wife of this game is too fun&#8221; and &#8220;Go after an airplane.\u00a0Do not know the horse of God.\u00a0The same point is useful only. :o&#8221; \u00a0But, judging from the emoticons (and Google Translate) they seem to be pretty positive and bearing out the 7.5 rating <em><a href=\"http:\/\/rocketshipgames.com\/games\/goldleader\/\">Gold Leader<\/a><\/em>&#8216;s maintaining there:<\/p>\n<div id=\"attachment_1109\" style=\"width: 310px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/02\/comments-3366.com_.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-1109\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-1109\" alt=\"Comments on 3366.com.\" src=\"https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/02\/comments-3366.com_-300x273.png\" width=\"300\" height=\"273\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/02\/comments-3366.com_-300x273.png 300w, https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/02\/comments-3366.com_-1024x931.png 1024w, https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/02\/comments-3366.com_.png 1135w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a><p id=\"caption-attachment-1109\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Comments on 3366.com.<\/p><\/div>\n<p>In some ways that&#8217;s pretty crazy and almost frustrating, to have this whole non-trivial audience I can&#8217;t communicate with&#8212;I want to tell them I appreciate it! \u00a0I had already started thinking about it earlier, but have definitely now worked out some basic support structures to do localization of future games, swapping in translated game text. \u00a0It just seems like all these fans should at least be rewarded by having the menus in their own language. \u00a0Most of them may not even realize you can fully configure the controls, which is a bummer.<\/p>\n<p>Beyond that though, it&#8217;s actually really satisfying. \u00a0One of the best moments of this whole project was an early pre-review from a paid first impressions tester on <a href=\"http:\/\/fgl.com\">FlashGameLicense<\/a>, who ranted at length about its virtues and declared:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><em>The piece reflects and projects legit understanding of what it wants to do, it is evident that it is being made by people who love and play this style themselves, and the fact that it is a rigorous and MEAN shooter, makes it an eminent declaration already.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>That pretty much made the whole effort worthwhile right there, much more so than the sponsorship. \u00a0<em><a href=\"http:\/\/rocketshipgames.com\/games\/goldleader\/\">Gold Leader<\/a><\/em> is not the greatest thing in game history. \u00a0But an awful lot of love and attention was put into making it run great, play well, and be a deserving homage to all the shooters I played endlessly as a kid. \u00a0From the minimal aesthetic to the conscious decision to ratchet up the difficulty at the risk of turning away more casual gamers, there was real design intent toward that end. \u00a0It was deeply rewarding then to have someone get exactly what the project was all about, be on exactly the same frequency, and really appreciate it.<\/p>\n<p>With these comments and hits though, it turns out there&#8217;s a lot of people on that wavelength. \u00a0Literally directly opposite from me across the globe, with a completely incompatible language, over what I would otherwise have assumed to be wholly unrelatable backgrounds, we&#8217;ve got this in common: We all recognize and love a good old school shoot &#8217;em up. \u00a0That I could get this art, this love letter, across so many barriers and\u00a0into the hands of all these people who would understand and appreciate it is why this, the Internet age, is the greatest of all eras.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>About four days short of a month after launch, earlier today my small Flash game\u00a0Gold Leader crossed over 102,000+ visitors, some 151,000+ plays. \u00a0Google Analytics believes just under 58,000 of them are actually unique and 45,000 are returning players. \u00a0That&#8217;s super sweet from a &#8220;People played my game!&#8221; perspective. \u00a0The breakdown on who they are &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/2013\/02\/im-big-in-china\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1104,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[398],"tags":[133,279,157,257,96,277],"class_list":["post-1102","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-game-design","tag-analytics","tag-business","tag-china","tag-featured","tag-gold-leader","tag-videogames"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1102","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1102"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1102\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1117,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1102\/revisions\/1117"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1104"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1102"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1102"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rocketshipgames.com\/blogs\/tjkopena\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1102"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}